Election laws are fraught with unintended consequences

As much as they have to do with each other, elections and legislative sessions seldom align in an intended way.

Issues that flare up in a session can fade by election day, and things can happen after sine die that put legislative votes in a much different light. When it comes to election laws passed in election years, many unintended consequences can arise.

It’s clear that the provision of the new voting law passed by the General Assembly in its closing hours, which allows presidential candidates on the Georgia ballot if they have qualified in at least 20 other states, is meant to boost Robert Kennedy Jr. and thus help former President Donald Trump.

It should be just as clear that in some future elections, getting a third-party candidate on the ballot could hurt the Republican presidential candidate. Of course the law could be undone, but that would be politically costlier than putting it in place. For a long time Georgia has had a reputation as a state with stringent ballot access laws. Whether intended or not, this law represents a crack in the wall for all third parties.

The new law expands — or clarifies, depending on which way you come on it — the grounds on which mass voter challenges can be filed. Voting rights groups and Democrats are going to condemn this and warn of chaos next November if this goes into effect.

But here’s a question. Since the General Assembly opened the door to these voter challenges in the 2021 voting law, more than 100,000 voters have already been challenged. We can assume that nearly all these voters, and all the local election officials who have had the additional burden of responding to the challenges, were in Democratic majority counties.

So how long is it going to take before Democrats realize that if blue counties can be swamped with spurious challenges, so can red counties? After all, more of their voters have already been vetted. Republicans have argued in so many words that voters should not feel inconvenienced by being required to prove they are voting legally. It would be interesting to see how their own voters feel about that.

Which raises another question. What percentage of those 100,000 voters who were challenged over the past couple of years have actually been discovered to be voting illegally and removed from the rolls?

In much the same way as computer programs and games have periodic upgrades, and for much the same reasons, this year’s law is upgraded from the 2021 law. But if this is Election 2.0, it’s hard to envision what developers will come up with for Election 3.0.

The crowning provision of this year’s law doesn’t go into effect for the upcoming election, but it reflects just how far into the weeds its authors have traveled to assure election deniers that they mean business. In a slap at 21st-century technology, the QR code currently on ballots will be replaced by something that looks like those little circles you filled in on standardized tests back in the ‘60s.

The new law also mandates that there be a watermark on ballots, which will require the secretary of state’s office to buy a $100,000 machine. House Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman John LaHood called this a “low-cost, high-value measure.”

It’s tempting to challenge LaHood’s assessment since a watermark’s value is mostly cosmetic. But he’s probably right. If that new machine in the secretary of state’s office reassures voters who think that elections are being stolen from them, it’s worth the money.

The 2021 election law inspired a story line in the new season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” in which Larry David gets arrested for passing out bottles of water to voters in Atlanta. It outraged U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. There’s not as much comedy material in Election 2.0, but it will inevitably draw some kind of court challenge.

And like the 2021 law, it will have very little to do with the outcome of this year’s election, and only a marginal impact on whether those on the losing end believe the results.